"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).

Sunday, December 26, 2010

There Is No Reaction

G.K. Chesterton, By a Reactionary:

Smoke rolls in stinking, suffocating wrackOn Shakespeare's land, turning the green one black;The crowds that once to harvest home would comeHope for no harvest and possess no home,While poor tramps that liked a little ale,In natural procession pass to gaol;Because the world must, like the tramp, move on,There does not seem much else that can be done.As Lord Vangelt said in the House of Peers:'None of us want Reaction.' (Tory cheers).

So doubtful doctors punch and prod and prickA man thought dead; and when there's not a kickLeft in the corpse, no twitch or faint contraction,The doctors say: 'See ... there is no Reaction.'